Our company has a SharePoint 2010 farm in production and no development environment.
I am looking for some tips/guide regarding the creation of such an environment.
So, what are the best practices? Is there a guide that could help me with that process.
The network administrator wants the dev environment on the same domain of the production farm... Is it a good idea?
In the end, we want a clone of our prod farm to use as a development environment.
Do a backup and restore, using an appropriate SharePoint-aware-backup tool, to a new server or set of servers.
I guess you don't have any documentation on how was the production installed ?
Instead of trying to clone, create a new platform that you will formely document.
Check in which version (CU) you are in production.
Install the QA sharepoint farm with same number of servers and hardware spec. Use different windows account, but the same number/usage.
Database server should be a different one (at least a different SQL instance).
If you don't have a clue on how is installed the current one, or how it has been setup, you can use this excellent tool (which is not free, but trial will do the job) This tool can then compare farm to see differences.
